TAMPA, FL.-The Florida Museum of Photographic Arts (FMOPA) presents the works of the Israeli-born photographer Shai Kremer. Kremers large panoramas and other works are featured in the exhibition Infected Landscape: Works by Shai Kremer, which runs through July 17, 2010 at FMOPA.

Born in 1974, Kremer photographs a Middle East landscape that is scarred by the warfare of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The wounded, infected landscape is a stand-in for the war-torn lives of people on both sides. Kremer does not take a pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian stand. Instead, he takes pro-human stand. He makes the point that people are part of the earth, and any wound on the environment is also a wound on the human condition.

In 1991, I started photographing the ominous imprint of the military on the Israeli landscape - and, reflectively, on Israeli society, he writes. My images mirror the psychological trauma and resulting ambivalence of living in a world of friction. They also warn against the vestiges of warfare becoming a permanent fixture in peoples lives.

In his photographic series Fallen Empires, Kremer meditates on the land that holds history without an end.

He finds an Arabic trench from the 1948 War hiding under a Roman arch, a British Mandate airplane hangar in the middle of an active Israeli landing spot, a Canaanite cave facing a Crusader fort. The recycling of these spaces, he writes, from one conqueror to the next, shows how most of the empires of history tried to conquer and rule this land, with one similar outcome: they failed.

Kremers work is in the permanent collections of Harvard University, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, New Yorks Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The exhibition is sponsored by Nina and Burton Bernstein; Fraser and Maria Himes; Jane Levin and Robert Lynn; Charles Schwab, Inc.; Linda Saul-Sena and Mark Sena with contributions from Maureen and Douglas Cohn and Blossom Liebowitz. The show comes from the Julie Saul Gallery, New York City.